Lost in a summer of scandal headlines was a significant bipartisan success in Lansing regarding education policy.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm recently signed into law the The 21st Century Schools initiative designed to address Michigan's high school graduation problem through smaller schools.

As important as the legislation itself is how it came together.

In January, the governor's chief education policy advisor, Chuck Wilbur, put together a bipartisan delegation of education leaders and lawmakers to visit Chicago and see how that city was attacking similar graduation problems. The trip was designed to cut through traditional interest group positions in several ways. Chicago was selected to show that a small-school concept could work in both charters and in unionized public schools. And, the trip was also designed to solidify working relationships between the Democratic Granholm Administration and Republican lawmakers working on education policy.

Out of the Chicago trip grew a diverse, bipartisan working group of education experts tasked with developing detailed approaches to small schools in Michigan. Here's their report.

The results of Michigan's new small schools initiative remain to be seen.

But the collaborative approach by volunteer experts, Democrats like Granholm and Wilbur, and Republicans like state senators Wayne Kuipers and Ron Jelinek, is a model for the kind of pragmatic, bipartisan problem solving Lansing will need more and more of in coming years.